"Telluria," a long-awaited novel from postmodernist Vladimir Sorokin, is among the most talked-about sensations of the year. Sorokin's life as a writer can be divided into two eras. He earned his notoriety in the 1980s, when his conceptual prose was a parody montage of the Soviet regime and its accompanying bourgeois lifestyle. His work was illustrated by flamboyant descriptions of carnal pleasures and perversities. In the late 1990s, he switched from this “Sots Art” style—a humorous juxtaposition of elevated Soviet propaganda coupled with a dose of harsh reality. He began instead to portray the horrors of an alternative, fictional history. What would life have been like, had mother Russia taken a different turn? These visions are elaborate and nightmarish with varying degrees of phantasmagoria. "Telluria" is another dystopia in this same vein. The book comprises 50 short stories united by a shared nightmare: Russia has broken down into numerous small pieces and …

It is said that Mikhail Vrubel sold his soul to the devil. So, it is no coincidence, people said, that all his problems and tragedies began when he was working on the “Demon Downcast”painting. Vrubel's “Demon” is a symbol of a man who wanted to fly too high, as high as God himself - and was downcast for his presumption. The painting is a classic illustration of theomachy; Vrubel was well aware of that. He said that he wanted "to express sensuality, a passion for beauty and sophistication – all the things people feel compelled to reject because of Christian ideas.” He had indeed expressed all these things - and he was downcast for it. He would work for 17 hours straight on the painting. He barely slept. He became a heavy drinker. He broke up with all his artist friends. A son was born to the Vrubel family when “Demon Downcast” was being painted. He was a good boy – but he had a birth defect, a cleft lip. Vrubel himself started hallucinating. He was put into a mental clinic. Meanwh…

Raisa Gorbachev was the woman who overturned the West's notion of the Soviet leadership. She became one of the symbols of perestroika (1985-1991), which was initiated by her husband. In the mid-1980s when the Soviet Union and the US only began to shed the state of the Cold War, the appearance of the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was instrumental in the warming in the relations between the two super powers. He was radically different from his predecessors, primarily his by his openness and readiness for a dialogue. In addition, his wife Raisa Maksimovna Gorbachev started escorting him on his foreign visits. Western society was used to the wives of the Soviet leaders always staying in the shadow. And it was something of a shock to see next to the secretary general of the Communist Party's Central Committee an educated, communicative and well dressed woman. It was also unusual for the citizens of the USSR. By the mid-1980s the arms race seriously depleted the economy of the c…

The forms of 19th-century European fictions, including the Russian, have a powerful relation to older Christian stories, from the Bible to Bunyan. The novels meet the old tales with part parody, part dialogue, part rejection and reconstruction. Middlemarch opens with a paradigm of its heroine as a "later-born" St Theresa, "helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul". Dorothea's virtue cannot find a form in her modern world. Unlike Eliot, Dostoevsky was Christian, and increasingly passionate about preserving faith. DH Lawrence, another maker of fictive prophecies and apocalypses, was reading The Idiot in 1915. "I don't like Dostoevsky," he wrote. "He is like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and in order to belong to the light professing love, all love." It had become, he shrilled, "a supreme wickedness to set up a Christ worship as Dostoev…

During a recent week in Florence I made about a dozen visits to an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi. “The Russian avant-garde, Siberia and the East” makes a case for the influence of shamanistic cult objects on Kandinsky, Goncharova and other 20thcentury Russian artists. The reason I went so many times, however, was simply that I wanted, again and again, to look at seven paintings by Pavel Filonov (1883-1941), whom I—and many Russians—consider the most remarkable of all the many great Russian artists of the last century. Many of Filonov’s paintings are huge and extraordinarily detailed. Seen closely, every element of Filonov’s works takes on a life of its own. One square centimetre of canvas could, if enlarged 50 or 100 times, be an entire Paul Klee—or a Miro, or a Kandinsky. Another square centimetre is more roughly textured—like the wrong side of a piece of richly coloured embroidery. Another square centimetre may be relatively empty—not a pattern but a delicate wash of colour. Each…

When at the years` decline my life will run its course
And, having dimmed the light, I will again disperse
Into the unseen world of foggy transformations,
When millions of newborn generations
Will fill this world with glimmerings of wonder
And will complete the nature’s full design,
My pity ashes may this waters line,
May I be sheltered in the forest yonder.

I shall not die, my friend. In flowers` exhale,
I shall again my earthly self become.
The centuries old oak in stern and morbid calm,
Within its roots my spirit shall enveil.
Inside its spacious leaves be shelter for my mind,
My growing thought will through its branches flower,
And from the forest dark above you hover,
So you akin my consciousness would find.

Above your head, my great-grandson, I’ll pass,
Across the sky, a bird in slow flight,
I’ll flash in summer storms with pale light,
With summer’s rain I’ll fall and glimmer in the grass.
Nothing more grand than being can there be.
The graveyard’s silent gloom is dull and wasti…

I ARRIVED here three days ago, my dear friend, and, in accordance with my promise, I take up my pen to write to thee. A fine rain has been drizzling down ever since morning; it is impossible to go out; and besides, I want to have a chat with thee. Here I am again, in my old nest, in which I have not been--dreadful to say--for nine whole years. Really, when one comes to think of it, I have become altogether another man. Yes, actually, another man. Dost thou remember in the drawing-room the small, dark mirror of my great-grandmother, with those queer scrolls at the corners? Thou wert always meditating on what it had beheld a hundred years ago. As soon as I arrived, I went to it, and was involuntarily disconcerted. I suddenly perceived how I had aged and changed of late. However, I am not the only one who has grown old. My tiny house, which was in a state of decrepitude long since, hardly holds itself upright now, and has sagged down, and sunk into the ground. My good Vasílievna, the hou…

When I was finishing school in the late 1980s, in the anarchic and utopian times of perestroika, I remember discussing in literature class the parable from Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel “The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years,”and what an impression it made on me.

The parable was about an Asian tribe’s ancient tradition of making their captives into perfect slaves called mankurts. The captives would be left for a few days in the desert without food or water, their heads shaved and wrapped in freshly cut camel skin. As the camel skin dried out, it pressed on the skull, making their hair grow inwards and creating unbearable pain. Most of those subjected to this torture died, but those who survived would lose all memory of their past and all human emotion. They would become the most valuable slaves: perfect, obedient and disposed to perform hard and tedious tasks. As long as they were fed, they never contemplated rebellion. Reading this during perestroika, many of us compared this legend to th…

‘Here is God’s plenty,” remarked the English poet John Dryden of The Canterbury Tales. A similar comment could apply to the work of the 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), who had much in common with Geoffrey Chaucer. Both writers travelled extensively, and both were candid observers, sharing an interest in ordinary people. Most importantly, they were originals, and whatever about Chaucer being an obvious literary pioneer, living as he did in the late medieval period, Leskov, who is so often referred to as Anton Chekhov’s favourite writer – and he certainly influenced the young Chekhov – and whom Mikhail Bulgakov frequently praised as a master, is different in style and approach from all of the major 19th-century Russian writers. There are several reasons for this, probably the most important being that he looked almost exclusively to an ancient Russia of traditional myths, fables and quasi-religious mysticism and superstition. He made inspired use of characters com…

When Nobel Prizewinning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn died five years ago, I experienced several days of flashbacks to the surrealistic times of Soviet power. I had been a correspondent in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s and my most vivid memory was encountering the great writer face to face. He wasn’t particularly happy to see me. Solzhenitsyn was tailed and harassed by the KGB for most of his life, and had made a dangerous game of dodging the authorities. Two of his early novels, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, had been smuggled out of the country by trusted foreign contacts and published abroad to great acclaim. He would later go on to expose the Soviet labor camp system in his classic Gulag Archipelago, a work that reverberates to this day. But he considered any interaction with the free-wheeling Western media to be risky, and he was right. Of course every correspondent in Moscow wanted to be the first to find him after he won the Nobel in 1970. I was a young reporter and I inten…

In the fall of 1947, John Steinbeck checked in at the repaired Intourist Hotel in Stalingrad with the great photographer Robert Capa: “We seemed to go on endlessly across the steppe, until at last, over a little rise, we saw Stalingrad below us and the Volga behind it.” The duo was far from their aristocratic room at the elegant Metropole Hotel in Moscow where they had begun their trip. In Stalingrad, “our windows looked out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized plaster,” Steinbeck wrote, “and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to grow in destroyed places.” During their time in Stalingrad, they became intensely fascinated by the resurrection of life among the ruins. The place was still horrifically gutted two years after the war, but it was far from deserted, they found. Stalingrad was a large city, and people had gone back to life and work. “Underneath the rubble there were cellars and holes, and in these holes many people lived. We would watch…

Leo Tolstoy died from pneumonia, aged eighty-two, at the railway station of Astapovo, a remote Russian village, on November 7, 1910. He had left his family home on October 28, in the middle of the night, walking out on his wife of forty-eight years—the long-suffering and increasingly paranoid Sonya. “I am doing what old men of my age usually do: leaving worldly life to spend the last days of my life in solitude and quiet,” he wrote in the uncomfortably chilly letter of explanation he left for her. In fact, there were to be very few of those “last days.” For whatever Tolstoy’s plans for the future had been (and we can now only guess at them), they were soon interrupted when he was taken ill on board a train and forced to get out at Astapovo, where the stationmaster gave him the use of his house. And there was certainly very little solitude or quiet. His death became one of the first international media “events.” It attracted to the little station not only hundreds of his admirers (and s…

Although composer Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) is best known for writing one of the best Russian operas, "Prince Igor," he was also a renowned scientist and chemist. In fact, many Russian composers were not only composers. Mussorgsky was a militarist. Rimsky-Korsakov was a sailor. By education Borodin was a doctor. He graduated from the Medical Academy, and he was a friend of the discoverer of the periodic system of elements, Dmitry Mendeleyev, and other luminaries. The great Russian chemist Nikolay Zinin, who taught Alfred Noble, also taught Borodin. Zinin was terribly annoyed by the fact that Borodin was interested in music. He used to tell him, "Sasha, forget these romances and enjoy a serious matter." However, despite the romances, Borodin worked seriously in science and is created with discovering the so-called Borodin reaction. But he was fatally unlucky: as soon as he started to deal with any problem, immediately it became clear that it was already taken by We…

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a Russian dissident and poet who defied Soviet authorities by starting an influential underground publication and protesting the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 77.

The Russian news agency RIA Novosti announced her death but did not give a cause. On Aug. 25, 1968, Ms. Gorbanevskaya and a handful of other dissidents gathered in Red Square, in Moscow, to denounce the Soviets’ sending tanks to Czechoslovakia four days earlier to quell the liberal reforms known as the Prague Spring. The group stood on a spot reserved for executions in prerevolutionary times and held up banners with slogans like “shame to the invaders.” Ms. Gorbanevskaya’s companions were arrested, but she was not, presumably because she had two young sons. She wrote about the trial of her associates for The Chronicle of Current Events, an influential underground publication she had helped to start earlier that year. Produced on mimeographed s…

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In Russia, history is too important to leave to the historians. Great novelists must show how people actually lived through events and reveal their moral significance. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, literature transmits “condensed and irrefutable human experience” in a form that “defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature . . . preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”

The latest Solzhenitsyn book to appear in English, March 1917, focuses on the great turning point of Russian, indeed world, history: the Russian Revolution.1 Just a century ago, that upheaval and the Bolshevik coup eight months later ushered in something entirely new and uniquely horrible. Totalitarianism, as invented by Lenin and developed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, aspired to control every aspect of life, to redesign the earth and to remake the human soul. As a result, the environment suffered unequaled devastation and tens of millions of lives were lost in t…

Gala – real name Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova was a wife of Paul Éluard, lover of Max Ernst, and later a wife, a muse and the only female model of Salvador Dalí. Elena Diakonova was born in Kazan in 1894. Her father was a modest clerk and died early. Following that Elena’s mother got married again to a lawyer. When Elena turned 17 the family moved to Moscow. Elena Diakonova got her education at the Brukhonenko Female Institute of Moscow. The sisters Anastasia and Marina Tsvetayeva (the famous poetess) studied at the same classical school. In 1912 Elena was sent to Clavadel Resort, Switzerland to undergo treatment of tuberculosis. This was where she met Paul Éluard. His father, a rich real estate salesman, had sent him there to get cured of…poetry. The ardour, decisiveness, resoluteness, and high culture of Elena Diakonova impressed and inspired the young poet. He nicknamed her Gala from the French word meaning “triumph, festival”. She marked his first outburst of love poetry, which went o…

"When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder — that seems to give a kind of background to another's grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. ... The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make. — To Lydia Avilova, March 19, 1892 & April 29, 1892
I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines. — To Maxim Gorky, December 3, 1898
Another piece of advice: when you read proof cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You ha…